Eyes Open

Note: This is a poem I wrote for my English class junior year while we were reading the novel, Invisible Man. The prompt was to take a selection words you see in the novel and put them together to create an original piece. This piece, although it can stand on its own, I think is better understood from the perspective of the main character of Invisible Man. In the novel, the main character wakes up to realize just how much being black in America in the 1930s has granted him invisibility – both a blessing and a curse.

Eyes Open

From down the hall I could hear Mary singing

I was dazzled

Suffering silently from this

Brightly colored beautiful noise

That blinded my mind

 

At once

I was illuminated from the blackness of my invisibility

A feverish dream

In which I myself was lost

With a swift shame, I realized

I never seemed actually to have been alive

And the world was a broken soundless fury

Of which all meaning escaped me

 

Now I walk slowly

Blinking my eyes open in the chill air

At last I can see

A feeble sun filtered through the haze

And the smoke of swift nostalgia floods in

 

I ask myself

“What is your name?”

And was lost for a moment in eerie quiet

My mind still full of a memory

Yet clear of features that tear me from

This blissful nothingness

 

And I see it is everything

 

Photo: This is a self-portrait I took of my own eye back in 2014.